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2014-10-16 08:47:25
Caroline Williams
Procrastinate often? Caroline Williams does, so decided to find out if brain
training could tame her wandering mind. What she discovered could help
everyone.
I am about to be zapped in the head with an electromagnet, once a second, for
eight minutes. I fidget, trying to get comfortable in a huge black chair with
jointed metal arms that stand between me and the door. I feel faintly
ridiculous wearing a tight headband with what looks like a coat hook on the
top. All you need to do is relax, says Mike Esterman, the researcher about to
zap me. That s easy for him to say he s holding the magnet.
"Willpower is like a muscle. I'm a big believer in that." Tim Pychyl,
psychologist
I ve come to the Boston Attention and Learning Lab in the US to try and train
my brain to focus better. Esterman and fellow cognitive neuroscientist Joe
DeGutis have spent nearly seven years working on a training programme to help
wandering minds stay in the zone .
So far, their methods seem to be particularly promising for enhancing focus in
US army veterans with attention problems linked to post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) and brain injuries, as well as people with attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But what I want to know is, can the
mind-wandering of the average procrastinating person be improved? And if so,
can they do it to me? Please?
Would firing a pulse into my brain help me focus better? (Caroline Williams)
A month earlier, when I had first contacted DeGutis to ask this question, he
wasn t convinced that they could help. It is typically quite difficult to
improve 'normal' functioning into the above average or superior range, despite
what some brain training companies suggest, he said. If you don't have poor
enough performance, training may not be effective.
But one look at my results on their online continuous concentration test, and
he changed his mind. I scored 53 more than 20 points below average (try it
yourself at the end of this article). And, after a few more online tests and
questionnaires sent by email, the cold hard truth hit my inbox. Considering
all your results, it's very clear that you have issues with attention and
distractibility both in the lab and in daily life. He won t be drawn on what
this might mean for my brain, but he does say there s room for improvement
and invites me to Boston for a course of intensive training and brain
stimulation.
I shouldn t have been that surprised. Among people who know me well I have a
reputation for not focusing on anything for very long. Years ago my brother
came up with the perfect name for a task that started well but got abandoned
halfway, with the accompanying mess left everywhere. Ah, he d say. That
looks like a Caroline job . An old friend had a more poetic version, calling
me butterfly brain , because of the way I constantly flit from one thing to
the next. I like this one better.
Hope for change
Fortunately for me and for anyone who finds their attention being hijacked by
Facebook, daydreaming or a sudden urge to put the kettle on there is good
reason to think that improvement is possible. A decade or so of neuroscience
has shown beyond doubt that the adult brain remains malleable throughout life.
The circuits we use most often become stronger and more efficient, and the
brain areas they connect become larger, while the ones we don t use, shrink and
fade away. Study after study has shown that your brain can be changed for the
better.
But and it s a big but to change anything in the brain you have to focus
your attention on it. So what if your problem is with the very act of focusing?
How do you concentrate for long enough to even start to improve your attention
span?
I m not the only one asking this question. Psychologists and neuroscientists
are increasingly interested in our ability to knuckle down, precisely because
so many of us find it hard. An estimated 80% of students and 25% of adults
admit to being chronic procrastinators, and with the internet and smartphones
offering an endless number of distractions from what we should be doing, it may
be getting worse.
No matter how much we like to think that a little procrastination makes us more
creative, the evidence suggests that it actually leads to stress, illness and
relationship problems. And having your head in the clouds doesn t make you feel
better anyway. In a 2010 study, psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel
Gilbert of Harvard University interrupted people throughout the day to ask what
they were doing and how happy they felt. They found that when people were
daydreaming about something pleasant, it only made them about as happy as they
were when they were on task. The rest of the time mind-wandering actually made
them less happy than when their mind was on the job.
So how can we take control of a wandering mind for a happier and more
productive life? Step one is to work out what is causing the wandering in the
first place. According to psychologist Tim Pychyl of Carleton University in
Canada, and author of the book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle,
procrastination is largely an emotional problem a psychological coping
mechanism that kicks in during times of stress. We have a brain that is
selected for preferring immediate reward. Procrastination is the present-self
saying I would rather feel good now. So we delay engagement even though it s
going to bite us on the butt, he says.
The good news, though, is that people can change their ways. Willpower is like
a muscle over time you can strengthen your attentional resources. I m a big
believer in that, says Pychyl.
Brain target
And this is exactly what DeGutis and Esterman have been working on. Their
training programme targets the brain s dorsal attention network , which links
regions of the prefrontal cortex the bit of the brain above the eyes that
helps us make decisions and the parietal cortex, the switchboard for our
senses, which is above and slightly behind the ears. The dorsal attention
network is the part of the brain that springs into action when we are
deliberately focusing on a task, and if it is to work for any length of time,
activity in what s known as the default mode network responsible for
mind-wandering, creativity and thinking about nothing in particular has to be
turned down.
Imaging studies have also shown that the right side of the brain s dorsal
attention network does the bulk of the work people who do badly on the sorts
of tests DeGutis and Esterman asked me to perform show more activation across
both hemispheres, suggesting they are leaning more heavily on the less
efficient left.
So as a less-than-expert focuser and an above average mind-wanderer, it could
be that my right hemisphere isn t working as hard as it should be. Or it could
be that I struggle to turn down activity in my default mode network, which
allows my mind to wander when it should be knuckling down. Now I have a chance
to find out which.
So here I am, waiting to be assessed in a 1950s style hospital room with an
X-ray viewer on the wall and a big black chair where the bed should be. On day
one, there is no stimulation, just a couple of hours of tests to get a baseline
for my powers of concentration in this particular week. In measures of visual
attention and propensity to get distracted by something that pops up like a
Facebook or email notification I do fine. I m not worried about your
driving, DeGutis says, which is good, because I was starting to be.
Focus, focus
But what constantly trip me up are tests of sustained attention how well I
can stay alert during a boring and repetitive task. The first test is one that
Esterman has affectionately dubbed Don t touch Betty . It sounds easy: a
series of male faces flash on the screen and you press a key as soon as each
one pops up. But when the only female face (Betty) appears, you don t press.
For me, it s not so much difficult as physically impossible. Even when I spot
Betty there never seems to be enough time to tell my hand not to press the
button. I spend the whole 12 minutes berating myself as Betty s Mona Lisa smile
starts to look more and more mocking.
Betty
In one tricky attention test used by researchers, the idea is to avoid clicking
this face "Betty" among a series of male faces
I later find out that my score on this test is off-the-scale bad. My error rate
is 51%, compared to an average of 20% in healthy volunteers. The worst score
they got in their study was just 40%. I, on the other hand, score closer to
people they tested who have PTSD or stroke damage
As well as scoring high on questionnaires measuring my general levels of
anxiety and impulsivity I get an above average score in mindlessness a
measure of whether you are the kind of person who wanders around in a daze a
lot. No wonder DeGutis and Esterman are looking worried. They have just four
days to improve my focus before I fly home to the UK and tell the world all
about it. Suddenly, I imagine, inviting a journalist to the lab doesn t seem
like such a great idea.
First step is a magnetic resonance imaging brain scan, so that Esterman can
pinpoint the brain region he wants to stimulate. He is aiming for an area of
the left prefrontal lobe, called the frontal eye field (FEF), which sits
roughly halfway between my left ear and the top of my head, and is part of my
underperforming dorsal attention network. The idea, I learn later, is to use a
weak electromagnetic magnetic pulse to turn down the activity in the left
hemisphere FEF, to force me to develop the more efficient right and boost my
powers of concentration sort of like a variation of strapping down a good arm
to force someone to strengthen the bad one.
The pulses were aimed at my left prefrontal lobe, to dampen the activity there
(Caroline Williams)
When I get to the stimulation the next day, it s not as bad as I feared. At
least not at first. For the first minute or so it feels a bit like popping
candy is going off under my skull. Five minutes in, though, and it s seriously
annoying like the worst school bully ever repeatedly flicking me on the head.
In all, I have two eight-minute-long sessions of magnetic stimulation, each
followed by a 12-minute-long session of computer-based training. I also do
three 12-hour blocks of training twice a day, over the internet, wherever my
laptop and I happen to be.
The training is along similar lines to Don t touch Betty . There s a target
image say a white cup on a brown table that flashes up on the screen every
now and again. You don t press the spacebar for that one, but you do press for
any other cup and table colour combination. The idea is to do it as fast as
possible so as not to cheat. At first it s every bit as frustrating as Betty
I see my hand moving towards the spacebar in slow motion but am physically
unable to stop it even though I know I should. The hand is faster than the
brain, it seems. Aargh!
After my first bout of stimulation I do even worse, and I can tell that
Esterman and DeGutis are a little perturbed. Neither of them is saying much but
it seems that they expected me to do better after a short, sharp zap. By day
three of the training I am doing no better and am so frustrated I feel like
yelling every time I hit the spacebar in error. I feel so stupid I have no
trouble spotting the target straight away. It s just that a gun to my head
couldn t stop from me pressing the space bar.
Cloud-watching - every procrastinator's favourite hobby
But then, out of the blue, sometime between morning and evening training on day
three, something clicks. My don t touch score jumps from between 11 and 30%
correct to between 50 and 70%. I m actually starting to enjoy it and have
begun to have a strange and sudden awareness of what s going on in my mind when
I accidentally press for a target. I realise, for example, that I missed one
because I was thinking about how to write the intro to this piece. And another
because I was wondering what my son was up to back home. And should I have wine
after training, or beer?
DeGutis seems to think this is an important development. Being aware of what
you are thinking is known in psychology as meta-awareness , and it s very
useful if you are trying to stop mind-wandering before it takes you too far
away. Everyone that the training has helped finds that they get to the stage
where they are a little more meta-aware, he says. They are doing the task and
they see themselves thinking about other things.
Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, studies the effects of
meditation on the brain and she has found something similar. In studies of
long-term meditators she found lower activity in a region of the brain called
the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), part of the default mode network that
controls mind-wandering. The upshot of this, says Lazar, is that better control
over the PCC can help you catch your mind in the act of wandering and nudge it
gently back on task. So when your inner voice is like oh I ve got a deadline
you can say, Ok, quiet, I m trying to concentrate , she says.
It certainly feels like something like this has happened in my brain. But
because DeGutis has been adapting my training each session to provide a
scaffold for my fledgling skills, we won t know if I ve really improved until
Friday, when I re-sit the Betty test. Until then they re giving nothing away.
All I can get out of them is that they are pretty sure I don t have ADHD
something all three of us had been wondering since my first test online. Bang
goes that excuse then.
A couple of days later, it s retest day and, after a short break for them to
crunch the numbers, the results are in.
First they are keen to point out that this isn t a proper experiment. I know
way too much about their research to be truly na ve about it and that's a
problem because it might introduce placebo-style effects that could bias the
results and anyway, they would normally do a course of stimulation and
training over eight weeks, with a control condition where they only pretend to
be zapping my brain. They won t be including me in any of their studies as a
result.
But, what is clear is that the intensive training has definitely done
something. On the Don t touch Betty task I went from an error rate of 51%
before training worse than the worst healthy person they recorded in their
study, and in the region of PTSD sufferers to 9.6%, which is close to the top
score in the same study. What s more, judging from previous studies my
improvement is real and not just an artefact caused by the fact that I was
familiar with the Betty task on retest day. That s remarkable, says
DeGutis. We were like, What? Did we run the same version of the test? .
Slow impact
In fact, I asked them the very same question immediately after the retest
because the experience of doing it was totally different. Rather than Betty s
face suddenly flashing before me, then fading away with a smirk, she seemed to
gradually and slowly appear, with a friendly smile that said Hi . I even
smiled back at her a few times as I held off from pressing the space bar.
But they checked, and it was indeed the exact same test. And incredibly, even
though it felt like everything was happening in slow motion, the average time
it took me to hit the space bar was the same in both tests 815 milliseconds
before training and 816 afterwards.
On another test, which measured my attentional blink basically how soon the
brain can refocus after a distraction I show similar improvements, scoring
46% before training and 87% afterwards. That s a huge improvement, says
DeGutis, and the attentional blink test doesn t show much of a familiarity
effect either.
I have to admit that I have definitely been feeling calmer and more focused in
general, and not just because I am in sunny Boston, away from the stresses of
normal life. But is it really possible that I have changed my brain in just
four days?
Not structurally, they say in unison. But functionally, how you engage the
brain something is different, adds Esterman.
There are some clues to what might have changed in one of the their most recent
studies, which tracked fluctuations in brain activity over time during a
Betty-style test. They found that when default mode network activity was high
suggesting mind-wandering an error was more likely, while more activity in
the dorsal attention network correlated with success. So we can simply see if
you are better at engaging this when you need it and not getting into this
mind-wandering default mode, says Esterman.
Because I didn t do the tests in the scanner there s no way of tracking what
was going on in my brain, but in the same study, a more consistent reaction
speed also proved to be a sign of being in the zone . And on this measure I
improved after my week of training. You still had moments when you were better
or worse, but in your worst moments you were absolutely not anywhere as bad as
last time, says Esterman.
Mind nudge
What this suggests, they tell me, is that I am using the same attention
resources more efficiently. And that s why it seemed easier because strange
as it sounds, when it comes to attention, less is more. Staying on task isn t
about pouring all your energy into the job it s about allowing the brain to
wander occasionally and gently nudging it back on course. And stressing out
about getting distracted only releases a flood of hormones into the brain, and
they don t help in the slightest.
When you re not too anxious and you re not too engaged and you re kind of in
this sweet spot, norepinephrine [a hormone responsible for vigilant
concentration] receptors in the prefrontal cortex called the alpha 2-A
receptors are on. If you get too stressed they shut off, says DeGutis.
So ironically, it seems that what is behind my wandering mind is trying too
hard to focus, which backfires, making me less able to concentrate. It s a
vicious circle. Now, though after only a week s training, it feels like I ve
cracked it.
Then DeGutis gives me the bad news. My new-found calm almost certainly won t
last. The dose you got will probably fade away in a week or two, he says. It
s the downside of adult brain training, apparently. Just like physical
exercise, you have to keep at it or you ll end up as flabby as before.
So now what? DeGutis promises to send me more training when I get home, which
is great, but I can t expect him to do that forever, and I can t keep crossing
the Atlantic for a top-up of brain stimulation. At some point I will be on my
own, left with a brain and personality that is primed to procrastinate. Making
their system work for people long-term is a problem that is very much in the
front of their minds too.
How about an app, I suggest? But they re in no hurry to go down that route. We
consider it a research project so we re not running to commercialise it because
we want to learn about it first, says DeGutis. And, they point out, the basic
problem is that the training sort of needs to be boring to do the job. It s
boring but it s good for you how do you market that?
In the meantime they suggest maybe finding a mindfulness meditation class, and
doing yoga more regularly than my usual once a week. They also tell me that
there is evidence that time in nature helps with focus, so getting in the zone
may be as simple as taking the dog for a tear around the woods whenever my mind
refuses to behave.
Less is not more
Since coming home I have come across some other suggestions. Attention
researcher Nilli Lavie of University College London has found that making a
task more visually demanding by adding more colours or shapes to the page, or
increasing the number of sounds your brain has to process takes up more
processing power, and leaves the brain nothing left to process distractions.
So, counter-intuitive as it sounds, making things busier might make it harder
for my mind to wander it just won t have the energy.
There is also a new app, called Focus@will, which claims to use the power of
music to increase focus by 400%, by calming the part of the brain that releases
norepinephrine. As far as I can tell it hasn t been tested in peer-reviewed
studies, and its results are based on very slight changes in brainwaves, so I m
taking it with a huge a pinch of salt. At this stage, though, three weeks
post-training and with my focus sliding back to normal, I m willing to try
anything to bring back that focused feeling.
In the end, though, the most important thing for me was that I went to Boston
to ask the question: can my butterfly brain be trained? And came back with an
emphatic: yes. Now I have two more questions: how can I keep it going? And
which brain wrinkle should I iron out next?